Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  He advanced up the hood a little, closing the gap between them. “And, well, if anything should happen to her – if someone was to, say, hurt her or make her upset or what have ye – well, we would have something of a problem with that person, Deadman and me.”

  “Right,” said Finn.

  “By which I mean, I’d personally rip their eyeballs out through their arse,” Artur said. “Then he’d reinsert them the wrong way round.” He smiled. “D’ye hear what I’m saying’?”

  Finn nodded, but looked a little blank. “Yeah, brah. But who’d want to hurt her?”

  “Well, let’s hope we never find out, shall we?” said Artur. He eyeballed Finn for a while, then shrugged. “Now, forget all that ‘kind and innocent’ shoite, and cast yer eyes in that direction. Ye’re about to witness a whole other side to our Ollie, so ye are.”

  Out on the clearing in the scrub, Dan stopped walking. “This’ll do,” he declared, shoving his hands deep down into his pockets. He didn’t physically feel the cold these days, but the stark emptiness of the place and the way the wind whistled around them made him shiver, all the same.

  Ollie looked around them. “Why here?”

  “Why not?” Dan grunted.

  Ollie didn’t really have any answer to that. She danced slowly on the spot, swinging her arms. “So… What do we do?”

  “Fonked if I know,” Dan told her. He exhaled. “But Artur’s right. You’ve got power, but you’ve got no idea how to control it. We need to work on that. I mean, we don’t even know what you can do. Not really.”

  Ollie’s head dipped, like she was in trouble somehow. “Sorry.”

  “Not, that’s not… You’ve got nothing to be sorry for kid. And don’t let anyone make you think you have. Least of all me,” Dan told her.

  “Sorry. I mean, not sorry!” she said, then she stood to an awkward attention. “How do you want to start? What should I do?”

  “You tell me,” he said, but her blank expression told him that was unlikely to happen anytime soon. “Let’s start with the sewers. When you almost blew us up. What did you do then?”

  Ollie blushed a little, then looked down at her hands. “Just sort of… whoosh. You know?”

  “No. I don’t know,” said Dan. “Show me.”

  Ollie pointed her hands at him. He quickly knocked them aside so they were aiming elsewhere. “Not at me! Over there. See that rock?”

  “There are lots of rocks,” Ollie pointed out.

  “The big one. Kind of looks like someone lying down.”

  “I see it,” Ollie said. She raised her hands again, only for Dan to push them down.

  “Wait. That is someone lying down. Hey, buddy!”

  The rock didn’t move. Dan drew his gun, switched to explosive rounds, and detonated a spot on the ground twenty or so feet away. It went up like a bomb blast, spraying soil and stones and sediment into the air.

  The person-shaped rock suddenly shifted. A hulking Igneon sat up, then groaned like he immediately regretted it. He wore a tiny party hat at a jaunty angle on his boulder-like head, and someone had written some pretty unpleasant things about him in lipstick on his craggy forehead.

  “Ow. Fonk,” the Igneon groaned. He blinked several times, then looked around and tried to get his bearings. “Where am I? What time is it?”

  “Late afternoon,” said Dan. “And you’re a few miles south of the city.”

  The Igneon jumped to his feet, displaying a surprising amount of dexterity. “What? Oh, fonk! Oh fonk, no! Afternoon? I’m late for work!”

  The ground trembled as he began to run, then he stopped when he spotted the car. “Hey! Can you give me a lift?”

  Dan looked the figure up and down. Like most Igneons, he resembled a landslide on legs, albeit with a funny hat on.

  Dan looked to the Exodus with its low roof and cramped seats.

  “No,” he said. “No, I cannot.”

  “Oh well thanks a bunch!” the Igneon spat, and then he was thundering off in the direction of the city’s tall spires, the world shaking beneath his feet.

  “OK, let’s try that again,” said Dan. He picked another rock. This one wasn’t in the shape of anything, and was almost certainly just a bog-standard big boulder. “Try that one.”

  Ollie raised her hands. Her tongue poked out of the side of her mouth as she concentrated.

  “In your own time,” said Dan.

  Ollie waggled her fingers. “Right. Here goes,” she said, then she glanced across to where Artur and Finn were sitting on the car.

  “Don’t look at them, look at the rock,” Dan instructed.

  “I am,” said Ollie, despite the fact she very clearly wasn’t.

  Dan side-stepped to his left and blocked her view of the car. “Forget them. Just shoot the damn rock.”

  “Right. Yes. OK,” said Ollie. She took a deep breath and thrust her hands forward.

  Nothing happened.

  “I know I said ‘in your own time,’ but if you could make that time at some point today, I’d appreciate it,” Dan told her.

  Ollie let out a little squeak as she thrust both hands forward again. The rock remained unshot.

  “What are you waiting for?” Dan demanded. “Just shoot the fonking thing.”

  “I’m trying!” Ollie protested. “I just… it’s only a rock.”

  “Exactly. It’s a rock. It doesn’t have feelings. It’s not going to be upset if you blow it up.”

  Ollie lowered her hands. “No, I mean… When it’s happened before we’ve been in danger. We’ve been attacked, or… or… I don’t know. But it sort of happens automatically and it’s just like I’m, I don’t know, guiding it. Does that make sense?”

  “Not particularly,” Dan admitted. He ground his teeth together, deep in thought. “I could throw it at you.”

  “Huh?”

  “The rock. I could throw it at you.”

  Ollie considered this.

  “That might work,” she said.

  “OK, wait there,” Dan said.

  He trudged over to the boulder and got into a lifting position. Artur’s voice drifted over to him on the wind.

  “Lift wi’ the knees, ye daft bollocks, not the back. How many times?”

  Dan ignored him. He heaved the rock up until it was almost at chest height, then the weight proved too much and he staggered as he was thrown off-balance. “Fonk. No, forget that,” he grunted, letting the boulder fall.

  “Well, that was embarrassing,” Artur hollered. “Sure, I’m cringing over here on yer behalf.”

  “Shut the fonk up,” Dan muttered, then he saw that Ollie was laughing.

  Shizz. That was the final straw.

  “Something funny?” he demanded, marching back to her. “You got something to laugh about?”

  Ollie’s eyebrows raised in surprise and her smile took a dent. “What? No, I just—”

  Dan jabbed a finger at her as he closed the gap. “You almost wiped out this city once. You almost killed yourself today. Maybe even me, too. And you think this is funny?”

  “No. No, I… I don’t…”

  “We don’t know what you are or what you can do. We don’t know anything about your power levels, and you’re standing there laughing?” Dan spat. “You might be the most dangerous fonking thing on this planet, and you can’t even control yourself enough to shoot one damn—”

  The rock exploded. Or imploded. Possibly both. Where there had just a moment ago been a lump of stone there was now a distinct absence of one. More than that, though, a circular patch of ground around where the rock had been was now shiny and smooth like polished glass. Tiny fragments of dust flitted in the air like microscopic insects, before being carried off on the wind.

  Dan, to his surprise, was lying on the ground some twenty or thirty feet away from where he’d been standing, and mostly upside-down. His coat flopped up over his head as he clumsily attempted to get back to his feet.

  Once he was upright, he brushed himself down, nod
ded like he’d totally meant everything that had just happened, then returned to Ollie. Her arm was still raised and shaking slightly. He placed a hand on it and gently guided it down.

  “So ends your first lesson,” he said, then he ducked as the sound of another explosion roared through the air, knocking his hat off and shattering one of the Exodus’s windows.

  “What the fonk?” he grimaced, turning in the direction of the sound. A mushroom of flame rolled up from the distant Down Here, a heaving mass of black smoke moving beneath it

  “That wasn’t me!” Ollie said, tucking her hands behind her back. “I didn’t do that.” She bit her lip. “Did I?”

  Dan shook his head. “Don’t think so, kid,” he said, squinting into the smoke. If he used his imagination a little, he could see a shape moving in there. A big black shape, he thought. With pointy tentacles.

  “I think we just found our sewer monster.”

  TWELVE

  BY THE TIME they made it back to the city, the sewer-thing was gone. Its trail of damage remained, though, and once the Tribunal had done their usual half-assed clean-up job, Dan had taken a look to see what he could find out.

  That didn’t, however, amount to very much.

  It had come out of the water by one of the ports where fishermen landed their catches. It had destroyed a few boats, killed half a dozen people, then wandered further into the city. Soon after, it had discovered a power plant. Soon after that, it had discovered that water and electricity didn’t really mix.

  Dan couldn’t tell if the initial short-out had caused the explosion, or if the thing had gone on a post-shock destructive rampage. Whatever the cause, the plant was now an indent in the ground, and thirty blocks in all directions were in complete darkness as the evening drew in around them.

  “From what I can make of the tracks it left, it looks like it went back into the water,” Dan said, gazing off in the direction of the harbor.

  “You mean the Tribunal wasn’t able to stop it?” Finn asked.

  Dan snorted. “The Tribunal wouldn’t have even tried to stop it. Uptown, maybe. Down this end, it’s a miracle they even bothered to show face.”

  “But people died,” Ollie said. “When it came out of the water, you said it killed people, right?”

  “Unless those six corpses we saw all butchered and beheaded themselves, I’d say it’s a safe bet.”

  “Then someone needs to do something! It killed all those people. It killed Banbara!”

  “And Bonbo,” Finn added.

  “Nobody gives a shoite about Bonbo. Sure, I don’t even know who Bonbo is,” said Artur. He was on the ground, peering into a deep gouge mark in the road that the monster had presumably left behind. “No offense, like. I mean, we only just barely care about Banbara, and two of us fecking lived with her.”

  “I care about her!” Ollie insisted. “She was my third-best friend.”

  “Out of the three people who you knew at the time,” Artur clarified.

  “People die in this city every day,” Dan pointed out.

  “Mind you, they don’t all die with a monstrous great spike up their arse,” said Artur. He held up his hands. “Not that I’m siding with anyone in this here debate, I’m only stating the facts as I see them.”

  “What if it comes back?” asked Ollie. “What if it comes back and… and… it kills a hundred more people. A thousand more!”

  “What, is it going for a record?” asked Dan. “It might never come back.”

  “But it might!” Ollie insisted.

  “She’s right, brah.”

  “Shut the fonk up and stop calling me ‘brah’,” Dan warned. He sighed. “Look, what do you want me to do? I’m a detective. People pay me to take cases. That’s what I do.”

  “And yet ye went roaming around in the sewers trying to find the thing,” said Artur. “Not to mention when ye saved those kiddies from that mind-controlling whatever-the-feck-it-was. No one was paying ye then.”

  Artur’s eyes narrowed. “Or were they? Are ye holding out on me, ye hatchet-faced robbing bastard?”

  “No, Artur, no one was paying me for that. But this is different,” Dan said. “That was from the Malwhere. This isn’t. Also, that was in a school. This thing’s out in the ocean.”

  “It might be in a school next time,” said Ollie. “Or… or…”

  “Two schools,” said Finn.

  “Right!” Ollie agreed. Their eyes met for a moment, then they both quickly looked away.

  “Well, if that happens we can worry about it at the time.”

  Artur shook his head. “It’s no use. He isn’t going to go for it, kids.” He squinted up at Finn. “Ye said ye could get a boat, right?”

  “Sure thing, brah.”

  “OK. Then if ye want my opinion – and I’ve no doubt that ye do, on account of me being a very clever man – then I suggest ye go out in the morning and see if ye can find anything.” Artur nodded to Ollie. “The two of ye, I mean. Together.”

  “Wait, what?” said Dan. “That’s a bad idea.”

  “Ye think? I don’t see the harm in it, meself.”

  “The two of them together? Alone out on the ocean?” Dan said, speaking about them like they weren’t there. “Uh-uh. Not happening.”

  “Why not?” Ollie demanded.

  “Because it’s dangerous,” Dan said. He pointed to Finn. “And you know nothing about this guy.”

  “Well… neither do you!” Ollie protested.

  “Exactly! But I know guys in general, and I know that a young girl going out on a boat with one she’s just met – monster or no fonking monster swimming around the place – is a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea.”

  “Actually, now I think about it, I have to agree, Peaches,” said Artur. He raised a hand to stop her before she could reply. “I know, I know, ye’re old enough to make yer own decisions, and ye’re right, we can’t actually stop ye.”

  “The hell we can’t,” Dan muttered.

  “Come on, ye shouted at the girl about a rock and she blew ye thirty feet through the air,” Artur reminded him. “Ye really think ye’re going to be able to ground her? Look at the pair o’ them. They’ve made their minds up. They’re going, whether we like it or not. There’ll be no getting in their way.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll go, too,” said Dan, crossing his arms across his chest.

  Artur rubbed his beard as he mulled this over. “Hmm. Ye know, ye might just have stumbled upon a solution to this whole problem there, Deadman,” he said. “Aye, ye know what? I reckon ye’ve cracked it. Me and you can tag along to make sure there are no untoward shenanigans going on. Great idea.”

  Dan looked pleased with himself, but it didn’t last long before he realized what had just happened.

  “Fonk,” he sighed. “Fine. We’ll go out and take a look.”

  Ollie clapped her hands excitedly. “Yay!”

  “But not for long,” Dan said. He pointed to both Ollie and Finn. “And you two are sitting at opposite ends.”

  NEXT MORNING, following a night which had seen him stabbed, clubbed, and repeatedly propositioned by Notty from property storage, Dan stood on a jetty listening to the water lapping around him, and wondering what the fonk that thing floating on it was.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  Finn, who was standing in the thing, looked down at it. His feet sloshed in the ankle-deep water as he stepped back to make room for Ollie to jump aboard. “Yeah, brah. It’s my cousin’s.”

  “It’s your cousin’s what?”

  “Boat.”

  Dan blinked. “That’s a boat?”

  “It’s his pride and joy!” Finn beamed. “Well, it was.”

  “Why ‘was’?” asked Artur. “Did he get his eyes fixed?”

  “He died,” said Finn.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” said Ollie. She rested her hand on his arm as he helped her into the boat, and let it linger for a moment.

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened?” D
an asked.

  “He drowned.”

  “OK, out of the boat,” Dan said, beckoning her back. “Come on. You’re not going anywhere in that thing. Hell, I don’t want to go in that thing, and I’m already dead.”

  “But you said we’d go out and look,” Ollie objected.

  “That may be, but we’re not going anywhere in that,” Dan said.

  He looked around them at the other jetties jutting out from the harbor. Most of the boats were battered old fishing vessels, but a small yacht with far more style and far less rust was tied to a little pier at the far end.

  It sat on the water rather than in it, a faint blue light glowing around the bottom of the hull and extending like a knife blade into the ocean below. The yacht’s bow was pointed like the nose of a missile and rose into a smooth canopy that covered the whole front half of the deck.

  It was, Dan realized, the exact opposite of the deathtrap Finn was currently standing in.

  “Let’s go in that one.”

  “SO, WE STOLE IT?” Ollie asked, raising her voice so Artur could hear her above the wind.

  “No. We didn’t steal it, Peaches, don’t worry. We took it without permission. That’s a very different thing.”

  Ollie frowned. “Is it? I thought it was the same thing.”

  “Only technically,” Artur assured her. He pointed up to the floating cities overhead. The blue engine glow of the vast island directly above them cast a supernatural glow over the water. “Deadman reckons it probably belongs to someone Up There.”

  Ollie raised her eyes to the Heavens. “But they don’t have any water.”

  “Exactly. Which is why they tied it up Down Here, so they could pop down and have themselves a little sail, or whatever.”

  “It’s not a sailboat,” said Finn from up front.

  “What?” asked Artur.

  Finn, who had been offering his help to Dan, but had been consistently ignored, looked back over his shoulder. “It’s not a sailboat.”